Remember the day when people argued against Apple and HTML5? Now, it seems the opposite is true. Everyone is jumping to go against flash, and support HTML formats.Their term of "open" is clearly back firing.

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment. Marcus Aurelius

I don't know anything about this stuff honestly. I mean, the reasons for/benefits of certain ways of programming that stuff. But flash has always bothered me. Not for security or anything else, I've never had trouble with that. But it just seems entirely unnecessary to have to install one thing after another to make things work. (I mean, I know flash is just "one" of those things, but honestly, all the codecs, formats, plugins, etc. just seems entirely unnecessary and rather annoying) If there's a way to do it without flash and eliminate even one of those pieces of trash, I'm all for it.

But while Google, Apple, Mozilla, Opera and others have had their say, Microsoft has remained largely quiet.

No they haven't. I guess the author of the article missed the blog post by the same MS employee he is referring to here that was made almost 10 months ago (here).

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Google is pulling support for H.264 as a tactic in their war with Apple.

What? Is he serious?

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Flash supports H.264, which is great, but the issue here is that we need the HTML5 standard to fully support H.264, and that’s simply not going to happen without Google on board.

Nor will it ever happen regardless of what Google wants given that the W3C will never include a patented format in the HTML standard.

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And I’m right there with them. WebM sounds great on paper — until you actually read the paper. At that point, you quickly realize that it’s a crapshoot at best, and one that will take several years to go anywhere — if it ever does. And it’s one that could ultimately face the same type of patent questions currently surrounding H.264.

It will take several years because the "big boys" won't support it. If they did, adoption wouldn't take so long. As for the patent part, he seems to be arguing that it's better to support a patented format now as opposed to supporting one that might be patented despite having been open to scrutiny for quite some time now. Stellar logic (where's that sarcasm button?).

Van it seems you are very pro-WebM. That's cool. And thanks for explaining why you are for it in the above post.

Actually I'm pro H.264. But I think I'll wait before I say which I think is better. I like H.264 now but I think WebM needs time to make itself worthy of being used. Will it ever become worthy? That I don't know.

It's not really that I'm pro WebM but more a supporter of open standards. Beyond that though, I see it as incredibly problematic that browser developers want to get behind a standard that is controlled by a widely acknowledged patent troll. On top of this, the argument that WebM has no hardware or software support is premature. Do people honestly expect WebM to be supported as broadly as H.264 right out of the gate? If that style of logic was used to determine the future of video on the web, no one would question the dominance of Flash since it already has wide ranging hardware support.

Something worth noting from this article with regards to the patent issue:

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What we do know for a fact is organizations such as Google, Mozilla, Opera and Adobe, all of who have very capable team of lawyers, have come to the conclusion that it is safe to ship the utilize the VP8 codec.

I think it's important to recognize this. Many will say that the VP8 codec potentially infringes on patents owned by the MPEG-LA. At what point do we ignore that argument given the widespread adoption by major corporations? At what point do we ignore the MPEG-LA's ludicrous and unfounded assertions that the VP8 codec might infringe on patents?